Saline desert

Like the sandy desert, the salt marsh may seem of little interest because of the single word “desert.” But it is also one of the most interesting communities of nature in South Kazakhstan. Its basis is made up of varying degrees of soil salinity, on which very specific vegetation grows or is mud-borne and salt-rich. First of all, these are solyanka, soleros, salt-shrub, niter and various tamarisks. Sometimes the salt-marsh desert looks depressingly monotonous and lifeless. Such are the plump salt marshes and takyrs. But sometimes, and this most often happens in rivers and lakes, the entire surface of the soil is overgrown with salt-tolerant grasses, and among them there are either individual bushes or whole groves (for example, from tamarisk). And then everything rings on the number of birds and insects. Here, and most often only here, you can see the green bee-eater, the tugai nightingale, the southern chat, the black-headed wagtail, the small and gray larks. In small puddles and solid old ladies – a huge number of Asian wetland exotics such as meadow grassholes, stilt and shiloklyuvka, whitetail piglet, sea plover, Egyptian and yellow heron, cormorant and others. Even just for the sake of this list it is worth going to the nearest such interesting place (for example, to Lake Chushkakol). And in the spring of the powerful spills of the Syr Darya, this list is tenfold. In addition, here you can find desert reptiles: steppe agama, foot and mouth disease, Central Asian tortoise and round heads, and the famous saxaul goldfish…